Julius Robert "Oppie" Oppenheimer (22 April 1904-18 February 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. Oppenheimer was responsible for organizing the Manhattan Project, for which he is called the "father of the atomic bomb."
Biography[]
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City, New York in 1904 to secular German-Jewish parents; he was the older brother of Frank Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925 before attending college in Cambridge, where he developed an antagonistic relationship with his tutor Patrick Blackett for his poor lab work. In 1926, he first met Danish scientist Niels Bohr, who persuaded him to study at Göttingen under Max Born, where he could achieve the innovations that he was unable to achieve in England. Oppenheimer befriended bright minds such as Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller, and he was known to be an enthusiastic speaker who occasionally took over seminar sessions. He obtained his doctorate at the age of 23, after which he gave lectures in Dutch at the University of Leiden and befriended Isidor Isaac Rabi.
Oppenheimer later returned to the United States to teach at both University of California, Berkeley and Caltech, where he worked closely with experimental physicist Ernest Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers. In 1936, Oppenheimer became a full professor, and he worked in theoretical astronomy and quantum field theory. During his career at Berkeley, Oppenheimer became active in leftist causes such as the unionization of faculty and radiation lab employees, fundraising for Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and campaigning for desegregation. While Oppenheimer networked with Communist Party USA members such as Haakon Chevalier, George Eltenton,Jean Tatlock, and Katherine Puening (the latter two of whom he had affairs with), he never openly joined the party, as he considered himself an independent thinker rather than an adherent to a Moscow-controlled party line.
In May 1942, National Defense Research Committee chairman James B. Conant, one of Oppenheimer's lecturers at Harvard, invited Oppenheimer to work on fast neutron calculations, and, a month later, Leslie Groves selected Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory in spite of many people's suspicions about Oppenheimer's left-wing politics and communist associations. Oppenheimer chose the remote mesa of Los Alamos, New Mexico (near Santa Fe) as the site for a secret research laboratory and the "Manhattan Project", and he oversaw the construction of a small town to house the entire team of scientists and military personnel. In June 1944, Oppenheimer set about designing an implosion-type weapon to function as an atomic bomb, and, on 16 July 1945, the first nuclear bomb was detonated at Alamogordo in the "Trinity" test; Oppenheimer remarked, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," in reference to the Bhagavad Gita. In August 1945, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, expediting the country's surrender and the end of World War II.
Oppenheimer in 1954
After the war, Oppenheimer failed to convince Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to ban nuclear weapons, and an October 1945 interview with President Harry S. Truman went poorly due to Oppenheimer's sense of guilt about the bombings; Oppenheimer told his Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson that he never wanted to see the "crybaby" in his office ever again. Oppenheimer continued to advocate for nuclear arms control measures in the years following the war, and he took up the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1947. After the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in August 1949, Oppenheimer advocated for talks with the USSR and opposed Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss and fellow Manhattan Project scientist Edward Teller's efforts to develop a hydrogen bomb, and Oppenheimer made an enemy of Strauss when he mocked Strauss' security concerns about exporting radioisotopes to Norway at a public hearing. In 1954, Strauss gave intelligence files compiled by Boris Pash - who had secretly spied on Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project due to concerns about Oppenheimer and his scientists leaking nuclear secrets to the Soviets - to the staunchly anti-communist political operative William L. Borden, who accused Oppenheimer of being a Soviet agent. Oppenheimer, who had already testified before HUAC in 1949, was called before an Atomic Energy Commission panel chaired by Gordon Gray, where AEC counsel Roger Robb aggressively insinuated that Oppenheimer and his wife were communists. While Oppenheimer and his lawyer Lloyd K. Garrison were able to fight off most of the accusations, Oppenheimer was forced to admit that his acquaintance Haakon Chevalier had offered to pass along Manhattan Project secrets to the USSR via George Eltenton if Oppenheimer was interested, and that Oppenheimer - while refusing to help - did not immediately report the Soviet plot. Additionally, Oppenheimer's former colleague Teller testified that Oppenheimer had acted in ways "exceedingly hard to understand," and that he "would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands." Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance by the AEC in a 4-1 decision, which would ultimately be vacated on 16 December 2022 by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Oppenheimer retired to the US Virgin Islands with his wife Katherine, and President John F. Kennedy rehabilitated Oppenheimer by awarding him the Enrico Fermi Award in 1963. Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in Princeton in 1967, and his wife died of an intestinal infection in 1972.